"Maybe we should let me go..."

...a quote from Christopher Reeve's biography, Still Me. It is what he said to his wife soon after his paralysis. Just three years into marriage, with both their lives looking so promising,--so much more could have been shattered besides those pieces of his neck, his spine. Her response was that she would be there for the long haul. Nine years, it ended up being. Basically, she said that she didn't need it to be easy, she just needed it to be with him. In a later book, she spoke of the fact that they found hidden gifts in sharing hardship. When he died, she had been a faithful wife, mother, activist for his cause. Not that long ago, her mother also died...of ovarian cancer. Now she, too, is dead...of lung cancer. I grieve for their 13-year-old son who will have to finish growing up without them as active parents; but in the short time that he did have them, he may have actually seen more of these "hidden gifts" she spoke of than many others see whose parents live to be 90.
We watched Cinderella Man just the other night, and the same feeling hit me then that I feel right now. How many of us actually stood in a doorway like the children in that movie, watching, learning as our anguished parents spent themselves: their pride, their health, their hopes and dreams for their own futures...to make a better world for us, their children. So desolate, so pathetically noble...handing off a lone piece of balogna so that a child wouldn't go hungry, and lying that he was "actually full" so that the child wouldn't know he suffered hunger at her expense. The look that passed between mother and father in that moment was the highest expression of respect and love. Few other opportunities afford such a love exchange. Few can bear it. But how much more faithful to the goal of preserving something good for us is that piece of balogna given to the child than are all the Mustangs that we proudly toss the keys to into the hands of our teenagers.
Few of us have experienced such things, but not because our parents wouldn't have done it for us...simply because they didn't have to. I wonder how well we would serve if such a call were put upon more of us than just these few randomly "unlucky" ones, like the famous Reeves family? What makes one man the Cinderella Man and another the man too proud or maybe too weak, too idealistic to walk in that type of gritty nobility, so instead he dies as a nearly-unknown victim of Hooverville violence?
What signs remain in the Central Park of today that reflect its inglorious days during the Depression? I wonder if we should ask our grandparents, what few of them are left, to tell us the stories of the past one more time before they all die away and no one is left who remembers how to live in anything but "Happy Days."